


the men who knew too much

by thepointsdonotmatter



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Groundhog Day, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:25:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointsdonotmatter/pseuds/thepointsdonotmatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Groundhog Day AU. Both Hannibal and Will know too much, in their own ways. </p><p>Fill for the <a href="http://hannibalkink.dreamwidth.org/1847.html?thread=2859063">kink meme prompt:</a> I am a complete sucker for stories where characters have to relive the same day and I've yet to see a Hannibal fic about it and that's a tragedy. So, it's a regular day and Hannibal and Will meet up per usual, but it all goes wrong when Will realizes that Hannibal is the Ripper. Things get bloody and Hannibal gets caught. He goes to sleep in a cell, only to wake up back in his bed. Cue Hannibal reliving the same day trying to keep Will from figuring it out and also trying to keep Will around. Ending is up to you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the men who knew too much

**Author's Note:**

> Copious amounts of Philip Glass were listened to and consumed during the writing of this story.

_Day 1._

Hannibal wakes up shivering, the cold seeping into the sheets like ink. A glance to the side and he sees that he accidentally left the window ajar, a shard of sky ghosting in through the hinges. He sighs softly at that, a smile budding: he’s becoming too careless, perhaps too confident.

He dresses carefully, and then crosses the room to close the window, the sound echoing flat and dull. Fatigue is still draped around him, casting a long shadow down his back and pinned to the floor with knives. These minor inconveniences prickle at him, but he concedes that they are worth it, worth the fresh heart and liver tucked away in the refrigerator.

The sun has already risen up high when he pulls up at the crime scene. Gravel crunches under his feet as he approaches the bustle of officers, camera whirrs, gestures shaping out theories. Will nods at him, distractedly: he’s dropped to a crouch, eyes skating across the victim where she lies on the river bank, dismembered in a pool of congealed blood. Jack’s chin is jutted forward, anxious, hands on his waist.

“Organs removed. Looks like the Ripper’s work,” he tells Hannibal, but his words are pointed down, towards Will: a question.

“He arranged her hair like a halo above her head,” Will murmurs to himself, but he straightens up, giving Jack a curt nod. “It’s him.”

Jack exhales, loud and drawn out. He looks ready to pull out his gun at a moment’s notice, to be desperately comforted by the feel of it in his grasp. Hannibal nearly smirks; he is standing directly in front of Jack. It is impossible to miss Hannibal’s head at this distance. The spray of his blood would create a halo for him, too, though Hannibal thinks he prefer wings – a shot to the chest, then.

Price is skipping stones on the river, camera hanging around his neck. “In my youth,” he brags, “I could get twenty skips, I could do this all day.” They watch the stone skitter across the surface of the water, finally sink down, and Jack mutters something about productive uses of time.

Will, still staring at the dead woman, peels off his gloves and shrugs off his glasses. “What did the Ripper do,” he asks, whimsically, “in his youth.”

\--

It isn’t supposed to go like this.

Will takes the glass from him, holding it by the stem, and he is rambling on about ghosts of cannibals and ten gunshots: then, twenty minutes in, he drops the glass. It bounces, wine arching up to bleed out into the carpet.

“What did you do, Dr. Lecter,” he says, quietly, “in your youth?”

Hannibal feels his mask slipping, and it isn’t supposed to go like this. He walks toward Will’s back, considers the tense line of his spine. He moves precisely, gliding the scalpel across the abdomen. Skin maws open but the organs are only nicked, and Will makes a choked sound, filled with anger and shock. He falls backwards into Hannibal’s arms and simultaneously tries to grab for him with wet red fingers.

There’s not much time. It isn’t supposed to go like this, and they stop Hannibal at the airport, even with the brim of his hat pulled down low, and the crowd of people pulsing and massive.

Will’s blood trapped under his fingernails, still. He wonders coolly if Jack will shoot him, a single bullet streaking out from the folds of his coat: it would be easy. But the other man just stares darkly at him from the other side of the cell, shaking with rage.

“You will tell me everything,” Jack enunciates.

Hannibal lies down on the cot and traces the cracks in the ceiling in his mind, once, twice. He holds his hand up and marvels that there is something to keep the light from passing through. “I would rather talk to Will,” he says, politely. “I estimate two weeks for him to recover: I was very careful about my evisceration. Don’t bother coming back until then, Agent Crawford.”

A pang of metal: Jack slams his fist against the bars. He’s talking fast, voice escalating to a yell, but Hannibal closes his eyes. He tunes it out like the never-ending scream of one of his prey, and sleeps.

. 

.

_Day 2._

Hannibal wakes up, and he is shivering. He blinks opens his eyes and sees the window, hanging open. Then he’s bolting upright, hands catching in the sheets: his sheets. He’s back in his house, the early morning light winking into the room. 

It wasn’t a dream, he decides, as he drags the window closed. He can remember, with stunning clarity, the warm feel of Will’s blood sluicing onto him, the trajectory of his scalpel (slightly diagonal), he can remember the bite of the handcuffs on his wrists and the sterile design of his cell. 

“Organs removed. Looks like the Ripper’s work,” Jack says, when Hannibal cautiously walks into the crime scene.

Will stands up. “It’s him,” he confirms.

Hannibal’s hears the sound of stones skipping on the water, counts them (the same as yesterday), his thoughts roiling and trying to untangle his confusion.

He slashes Will’s stomach again later, the same spark driving him to cut and flee, the same realizations and gasps emitting from Will, and later that night he wills himself to sleep in the embrace of the bright lights and barren walls. 

. 

.

_Day 7._

Hannibal wakes up, shivering.

It’s easy, too easy, to convince Will to take the day off. Like a slow-motion fall that will break bone, Will senses the urgency, the fresh desperation surrounding him. He lets himself be led away, Jack’s gaze a warning that skids harmlessly off their backs. Hannibal looks over his shoulder at the lot of them, arranged like a tableau, stagnant in his eyes, and then he drives to Will’s house.

“No session at your office?” Will asks, blearily. He’d fallen asleep, skull knocking against the glass. 

“No,” he says, tightening the scarf around his neck, a noose. “Let’s take a walk.”

Will shrugs, noncommittally, and they tread through the sparse fields. Winston yips along at their heels. Their cold breaths fan out, and the caliber of Will’s footsteps are light and not yet suspicious. They take turns throwing a stick for Winston, the dog’s tail poking up above the acres of patchy grass when he tears after it. 

Will smiles and nudges his shoulder. “Didn’t think you were the type for these kinds of pastimes, Dr. Lecter.”

“Oh?”

“Me, I can see. Walking in circles around my house, brooding,” Will gestures, the motion partially aborted because his hands are still jammed in his pockets, “I brood. Comes with the job.”

As they talk, it is a rare glint of serenity for Hannibal, the underbelly he can rarely expose. Punctuated by the knowledge that it might dissipate. Will plays languidly with his dog, his lit house a fixed point, and Hannibal hopes he doesn’t have to wait for the change in Will’s posture to happen around it.

But it does. Will fumbles for his phone, staggering backward, and today Hannibal doesn’t stop him.

. 

.

_Day 13-20._

It’s near impossible for him to wake up early enough to move her body, sprawled out next to the river bank. The default angle of the open window won’t let him. The default position of the slice of sun won’t let him. 

He still tries.

Sometimes he is able to erase a few things: the halo of her hair, a few of her limbs. 

They always catch him, arriving and seeing his gloves flecked with blood, hair unraveling down his face and damp with sweat. It shakes loose a visceral anger from him, hearing the yells and snaps of guns cocking, and Jack takes one look at him and shoots him: in the head, in the neck, or in the heart. Sometimes Will is there but Hannibal’s eyes won’t focus: he can’t see his expression. He vaguely makes out a wavering silhouette. The sky and spindly trees won’t stop spinning around him and the ground shakes with the impact of all of Jack’s men and women. 

He bleeds out, pitifully slow, before he can wake up again.

. 

.

_Day 28._

A gush of scarlet: Will’s insides are always the same color, singular in their pursuit to shimmer on the carpet.

Hannibal pauses, considering the appeal of fleeing today. Decision made – un-made –he drops the letter opener. Kneels down next to Will and grabs his throat, closing the awful wound with a slick rasp. Will is shaking, eyes pitched wide open in shock, and in the silence of the room his arm jerks up, as if to point an accusatory finger, or, just maybe, reach out to him.

There are many demons hidden in the corners of Hannibal’s office, but Will whispers that he is the only one everyone needs to fear. 

. 

.

_Day 32._

It feels like escape and isolation. Hannibal locks himself inside the house, smoking cigarettes, head tipped back against the wall until it’s impossible to breathe. He runs through his collection of books in alphabetical order, forwards then backwards. There’s not enough air. He coughs and coughs and wonders if he could develop lung cancer in the span of this one day. 

The sun begins to dip down eventually. Someone knocks at his door, the raps contained and muscular; he ignores it. 

And then Will crawls in through the window like a lover, and with the flap of his coat come the questions, tipping out and into the space between them. 

He can’t hide, and he can’t run.

. 

.

_Day 50._

It’s elegant in some respects, the way he can get blood up to his elbows, and wake up perched on a clean slate. And yet, it is banal. Ignoble. He is jammed between yesterday and tomorrow; none of his actions carry meaning forward. The man on the street can be easily killed, the pattern of his screams memorized, a broken animal trying to crawl away from his knife. He can whisper obscene coos about Miriam Lass to Jack and watch the meticulous clockwork of his poker face fail, crumble. 

Hannibal has done these things, but. But there is no game in it, no beauty to underlie savagery. It’s ugly. It’s a deranged mobius strip, uncaring of where he finishes the day. Everyone else dies a certain way, the lilt to their bodies timeless, and everyone else finds the same thing in today.

Today is the day Will Graham rips down the veil and finds him.

. 

.

_Day 80._

When he kisses Will in the shade just off center from the crime scene, Will says, “what,” and then he says, “ _oh_." The hesitation, stemmed from being pulled a few minutes into the woods, rapidly wears away and he lets Hannibal force him back against itchy bark. Their kisses turn biting and hard: Hannibal draws blood, trails his parted red mouth down Will’s neck, and he groans, grinding their hips together. 

Hannibal’s tie swings where he is leaning forward slightly. He can hear the soft snicks of Will’s blue latex gloves catching and scrabbling at the trunk behind him. Will’s legs are splayed open, the fabric of his pants stretched taut, and he reaches down to cup Hannibal’s ass, pulling him closer. Guttural breaths: inhale and exhale in a rich litany. Hot sunlight showers down through the part in the trees overhead, and neither of them think to think about the drawn chalk lines of their professional relationship.

“How long have you wanted to do that?” Will says afterwards, his gaze still sated and unfocused. He tilts his head down. Hannibal feels the upward tug of his lips against his cheek, the smoothness of teeth.

“Ever since today,” he replies, and Will’s brow crinkles in confusion, too tired to think the answer through. 

He tells Will to come see him later, and then he waits.

Will does come, but Hannibal opens the door and Jack is pointing a rifle directly at him, the muzzle a bottomless pit, and the SWAT team pours out of the black cars. And Will won’t look at him, standing off to the side, face pinched and lost. 

. 

.

_Day 84._

He fucks Will so hard into the mattress that the other man is clawing through the sheets, suckled neck displayed. His hands slip on the sweaty skin of Will’s hips but he keeps going, a pleasant curl in his gut, even when Will’s foot twitches where his leg is hooked over Hannibal’s shoulder, and his whole body freezes.

“Y-you’re him,” Will chokes out, “the Ripper…”

He buries himself in him. He can’t tell whether Will’s trying to push him away or if he’s pushing himself up to meet his thrusts in a new, mad scramble for power. 

Hannibal comes with a growl and sees white, Will shuddering underneath him as they ride out the last few threads of sex. It is not enough for him. Barely five seconds later and the sheets are nearly ripped off the bed as Will scrambles away, tumbling onto the ground. 

They both lunge for Will’s discarded jeans at the same time, the gun tucked in its holster on the belt. There’s a couple seconds of noise and nothing where they grapple for the gun, awkward and desperate, before Hannibal mashes their mouths together, trying to bite some sense into him. Will recoils.

He’s not sure exactly how it happens, but both their grips are catching and sliding on the cold metal and the next moment Hannibal feels his head snap back with the impact of the bullet.

. 

.

_Day 100._

“How long have you wanted to do that?” Will asks, panting, neck lolled back.

The question has a trajectory. Hannibal zips his pants and straightens up. There’s a bitter feeling almost like nausea in the back of his throat, and he has to turn away. Something inside him is unraveling, worn too thin, exposed and out in the open where Will’s eyes are hitting his back. He doesn’t realize his chest is heaving until Will says, cautiously, “Hannibal. What’s—are you okay?”

He puts a hand on his shoulder, and it feels like an anchor, solid land, and it also feels like a hook cutting into his flesh, so he shakes it off. Will is hovering, nervously, trying to stuff words back in his mouth.

“Help me,” Hannibal hears himself whisper.

Will looks hopelessly confused. He takes a stab at it. He ducks his head in, kissing his neck chastely. “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

Hannibal turns around and punches him. 

The crack of his knuckles inelegant, the spurt of blood from Will’s nose landing on the leaves as he staggers back. Hannibal draws back his fist again. He expects Will to pull out his gun in one fluid, economical motion, but he doesn’t: his hand is clutched to his face, and there’s hurt and shock pooled in his eyes. 

“You’re going to figure it out,” Hannibal says, not even bothering to hide the malice twisting his features. His hand opens like a collapsed flower but the intent is still there. His cheeks are still wet: he doesn’t understand. There is a lesson to be learned here. He doesn’t understand. Not yet.

. 

.

 

_Day 110._

Convincing Will is not the problem. Hannibal lays out what everybody will say and do at the crime scene, down to the last miniscule detail, a cartographer of this one Wednesday. It’s crazy and it’s absurd, but Will takes it all in. His trust extends to a profound level.

The problem is this. Will always tries to help. Will always promises, “We’ll figure it out.” Will always smiles at him because he doesn’t really get it, how it feels. Today is always important for him because they found a dead woman and the Ripper wrote it, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

Will doesn’t realize the bomb is inside his head.

.

.

_Day 364._

He supposes it had to come to this. 

“You’ve been waiting a long time to tell me about this,” Dr. Du Maurier says.

Hannibal allows himself the ghost of a smile. “I’m finding it difficult to reach out to Will Graham,” he admits.

“Hannibal.” she begins. Her voice is meticulously poised and she knows exactly where to place each word, and he wonders how long it will take him to re-perfect that skill. “Getting too close to a patient can be dangerous.”

“You seem to think I’m overstepping boundaries. Asking things of him he can’t do, things that might push him over the edge.”

She inclines her head. “Are you?”

He looks past the wine glasses in front of them; his thoughts linger on times underneath tree branches. This much is deliberate because he wants her to see this, this expansive billowing of his scattered thoughts, and for her to meet him side by side at the same conclusion. “I can’t take back my actions,” he says, even though that’s only half true. “What I did yesterday, for instance.”

“You can’t,” she agrees. “But I know you well enough, I think.” 

Her pupils are chips of ice. Hannibal wills her on and she complies: “I suspect you’ve already thought it through, but I’ll ask you anyway. Is it hard for you to accept the notion that in the end, you would be compelled to choose your own safety over a patient?”

He meets her gaze unflinchingly. 

. 

.

_Day 365._

In the end, Will says “we’ll figure it out,” and Hannibal drives them out to a faraway beach on the coast. Nobody comes here anymore: the edge of the sea and lap of the wind are too violent; the rocky outcrops are too sharp; the sand is turning white with age. An abandoned boat washed up ashore here, years ago: a crash, most likely. Tipped on its side, as rusted and discolored as the land surrounding it. 

Will runs up to it first and climbs aboard, inspecting its weathered parts before he can rein in his gut instinct. Hannibal has to crane his neck up to pinpoint him and from there Will’s smile suddenly shrinks, his hand clenching against the railing. “Why did we come here?” he asks. 

“You grew up in boatyards with your father,” Hannibal says simply. 

Will jumps down from the boat, and the sand is so brittle their footsteps only begin to hold once they near the shoreline. “Another life ago,” he says. He stops, behind Hannibal. “Is that how you feel?”

“I feel old.”

“There’s something else,” Will mutters, caught up in the roar of the wind. “Hannibal,” and it’s the crack in his voice that makes him turn, “What happens at the end of each of these days?”

Hannibal coaxes the necessary emotions into his voice. “You die,” he says. This is a performance like any other, and it’s a shame no one will be able to psychoanalyze it and lay each fragment out, bare and whole. “The Ripper finds you, and he tortures you, and he kills you.”

“Oh god.” Will buries his face into his hands, almost seems to shrink into himself. When he drops his hands at his side again, it is like looking at a shell. 

“Can’t you…” Will ventures again, mouth quivering. Hannibal grabs his shoulder and he says it all in a burst, the stress of it strengthening his accent:

— _no, no, don’t you see? I’ve tried everything, I’ve tried to warn Jack and the others, I’ve tried to take you to the corners of the Earth, but he always finds you_ —

“Will, this is bigger than any of us,” he continues, “he is everywhere and everyone and – I don’t know how to stop this cycle, but I do know how I can spare you the pain.”

Will leans into his grip and it does not take him long to see the scalpel in Hannibal’s hand. He whispers, something sleeker and infinitely more beautiful than this dying beach and its juncture with a turgid sky, 

“You are going to kill me.”

“Please,” Hannibal says, and for instant he is scared – or maybe just surprised – a flash of something human and unexpected at the way he doesn’t have to try very hard to pour the feelings into his voice, his body language. “It’ll be like falling asleep.”

Will doesn’t say anything for a long time. They stare at out at the horizon together: the calm before the storm, the helpless man jamming the shovel into his own grave. There’s no one else around for miles, but Will’s sudden wordless yell, echoing on and on, is enough alone to smear and stain the air. Hannibal immediately wraps his arms around him, and they fall to their knees together. He waits, patiently, the sharp tip of the scalpel out in the open.

He tastes the unmistakable tang of salt when Will crushes his cheek against him. He licks his lips. 

Will finally, finally nods. 

Hannibal looks across at him, and he understands. This is his masterpiece, his work, the culmination of _today_ : this man, standing next to him. The man he wants to break and has tried to kill. The man he’s fucked and kissed a thousand times over like a raw ache, in between the sheets and under the shafts of chlorophyll; the man who has chased him and seen him handcuffed in the very same woods. The man who will turn on him in the blink of an eye; the man who trusts him, down to his bones, up until the precise moment he doesn’t. 

Will looks up at him with a boyish tinge, even though he’s still shaking. The beached boat looms behind him. “See you tomorrow,” he murmurs. “Or...today, I guess.”

Hannibal returns his crooked smile. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. “Today,” he repeats, because he knows it will comfort Will. 

Then he does it, neat in the way unyielding metal is: slashes his carotid artery. Will slumps backward against him, and his fingers spasm in the cage of Hannibal’s hand. It only takes seconds to bleed out. Hannibal counts every one of them. 

He sighs at the dead weight in his arms, then, watches Will’s red life trace out lurid patterns in the sand. The waves are roiling endlessly and all around him is a thicket of wind and sound, things churning forward, heedless of two figures on the beach. Will’s burnt out blue eyes are fixed on the boat.

He buries Will deep, deep beneath the sand and lets the water ebb away the blood. He walks back to his car. It is nightfall by the time he arrives at his house. The rooms are silent and familiar, albeit empty. He passes by the dining room and imagines it full, glasses clinking and women decked out in their red dresses, men straightening their suits, their faces cut out of the frame above the nose: hands clapping at the bursts of color in front of them, and the warm heady bustle as they all close their eyes and moan at the first bite of flesh. 

Hannibal sleeps with the echoes of that memory in his ears.

.

.

.

.

He wakes up. The window is closed and thin strands of fog are clustering outside.

He has a text from Jack. 

_Need your help. Will is missing._

Hannibal shrugs on his coat and his scarf and his gloves, and he stands in the center of the room. He closes his eyes and breathes, the air no longer stale. 

He puts one foot in front of the other, slowly at first but not for long. He resumes. 

.

.

.

.

_Day 220._

“Does this make you a twisted version of a time traveler?” Will asks, knees knocking together. “I don’t know, an old soul in a younger body?”

“Maybe,” Hannibal says.

Will pushes his glasses up, throws an arm over his head in the same arc of motion. “Don’t you get tired of talking to me, then? I must do the same thing every day.”

Footsteps interrupt them. Will doesn’t flinch but he sighs, vaguely annoyed. “Jack. Investigating where we ran off to. I hope I’m better company than he is.”

“That, you are,” Hannibal concedes, and they share a laugh, a private laugh. 

“I’m thinking some red wine during our session today,” Will drawls, languidly, like a cat in the sun. “What do you think?’

“Oddly romantic.”

Another laugh is pulled out of Will’s body, all angular curves and intent, but half his smile is melting away, replaced by something carefully neutral. He’s looking up out the corner of his eye and Hannibal can make out Jack’s form approaching in between two bowed branches. Crisp files and paperwork brandished in one blue hand.

“Yeah,” Will says, absently, standing up. “God forbid you fall in love with me.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Gif and the imagery of the boat on the beach is from the beautiful movie "Never Let Me Go." The entire gifset can be found [here.](http://michmemoirs.tumblr.com/post/41214437002/gifmeme-never-let-me-go-space)


End file.
